Amazon, WikiLeaks, the Washington Post and the CIA

So what does Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ decision to buy the Washington Post mean?

That was the question NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik tackled on Morning Edition (8/6/13). It was good to hear Folkenflik note that there is an “enormous constellation of issues” that affect Amazon‘s bottom line in Washington–which should raise some concerns about conflicts of interest on issues like internet sales taxes and copyright/intellectual property.

And he added that the company is becoming a “major vendor” to the U.S. government, particularly in the realm of web storage. The most prominent example: The CIA recently reached a $600 million deal with Amazon to build its cloud storage system.

So what happens if, say, the Washington Post wants to report on something that CIA or other intelligence agencies might not like? Folkenflik commented:

I suspect Bezos doesn’t intend to interfere in things like that, but we don’t know how he’s going to do it yet. We haven’t seen him operate in this realm.

It’s correct that we can’t be sure, but we do have at least one lesson to consider: Amazon‘s relationship with WikiLeaks.

After the publication of the State Department cables, WikiLeaks was booted from Amazon‘s webhosting service AWS (Guardian, 12/1/10). So at the height of public interest in what WikiLeaks was publishing, readers were unable to access the WikiLeaks website. The decision came right after politicians like Senator Joe Lieberman called for action to retaliate against WikiLeaks. Amazon denied it had anything to do with politics. The company’s statement stressed that the decision was theirs alone–WikiLeaks had violated the terms of service agreement, since “WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content.”

Amazon‘s decision is troubling. But would it suggest a real shift? Former Post publisher Katharine Graham gave a speech in 1988 at the CIA headquarters, where she reportedly said this:

We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things that the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.

Activism Director and and Co-producer of CounterSpinPeter Hart is the activism director at FAIR. He writes for FAIR's magazine Extra! and is also a co-host and producer of FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin. He is the author of The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly (Seven Stories Press, 2003). Hart has been interviewed by a number of media outlets, including NBC Nightly News, Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and the Associated Press. He has also appeared on Showtime and in the movie Outfoxed. Follow Peter on Twitter at @peterfhart.

What conflict of interest? It is entirely in Amazon’s interests to purchase the WP in order to further its consolidation of power and market share in the online world, not to mention all the retail it has subsumed.

Unless we are talking about a conflict of interest for the American Public. But if we are, then it is a moot point of course since the Internet is not owned by us, but by corporations and its hostage government that enforces its decisions in the name of profit.

Lieberman told Visa too, right?
What did it bring him -and them?
And what did it bring your President?
And Putin is not going to shave the piglet!
Computer-boys know this: contracting=sidestepping responsibility=no end node.

It’s real simple:
If you are a business, you need to market yourself to customers at affordable market rates. If you refuse to do that, by charging through the roof rates that taxpayers are FORCED to subsidize at the point of a GUN or a tank or a missile or a taser or a drone, you are attacking your customers and your potential customers in the worst way- and you are beholden to the wishes of an adversarial evil State which demands any and all your client’s private data. For example, what books you are reading, backdoors to your virtual servers in the Amazon cloud, etc.

At one time, Amazon was in the good graces of internet netizens. Today, you are a fool to do business with them.

OK so what did you want Amazon to do WRT Wikileaks? I am not apologizing for them when I say it was a significant breach of their TOS for which they didn’t even have the claim for immunity because they were a news organization (not that that exists anyway, although it should). The govt. could have destroyed Amazon if it went after them. What were they supposed to do as a practical matter. It’s just not where the battle can be productively engaged.

Regarding the CIA contract, the CIA is fucked. Now we’re relying on just completely random programmers overseen by completely random people- mostly H1Bs in both cases- to support our national security infrastructure. Yeah, good luck with that.

I am speaking from experience. To work on infrastructure programs for the CIA, no, you actually don’t have to have high level security clearance and anyway there is just no way to confirm that all the code introduced is not a programming form of sleeper cell – malicious, hidden and waiting for its ‘go’ signal.

This where Rumsfeld / Cheney / Reagan / Freidman style of seeing everything in the world as merely monetary and transactional gets us. Outsourcing national security to 3rd parties (and effectively anyone who knows those parties) is the definition of a bad idea.

Regarding Graham, what did you want her to say? She is speaking to the CIA, acking the importance of secrecy in a national security affairs (you disagree?) but reserving the 4th estate’s right to act independently if not orthogonally to those concerns, while retaining the spirit of acting in the national interest.

It’s what I would have said, or about that.

I agree that anytime a billionaire buys a paper it’s a concern and you have to watchdog them for bias in favor of their business interests. I am not a Bezos fan for other reasons- (software patent abuse) but let’s be seen reacting to reality and not conjecture or supposition. Then we get to keep our cred.

Gone are the days when a major newspaper would print The Pentagon Papers or spend a few years investigating what started out to be a minor story and ended up with a President’s resignation. Given Amazon’s cowardly reaction to Wikileaks, I don’t expect Bezos to fundamentally change the culture of the Post or the way it grovels in the face of authority.

[…] of the terms of service agreement. But not everyone was convinced it wasn’t a political decision, since the timing of Amazon’s decision since followed a call from politicians such as Sen. Joe Lieberman […]

[…] When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Post in August 2013 for $250 million, his acquisition provoked concerns that the paper’s reactionary posture would only harden further. The Post’s dim view of whistleblowing accorded well with Amazon’s, for example. Under Bezos’ directorship, Amazon had stopped hosting WikiLeaks on its web servers hours after receiving a request from the office of then-Senate chair of Homeland Security, Joe Lieberman, in the wake of the news outlet’s publication of State Department cables. “So at the height of public interest in what WikiLeaks was publishing, readers were unable to access the WikiLeaks website,” wrote FAIR’s Peter Hart (FAIR Blog, 8/6/13). […]

[…] article in FAIR discusses Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post in relation to WikiLeaks, noting Amazon’s 2010 decision to remove WikiLeaks from its servers after US Senators called […]